October 24, 2007

Two years ago today, Blue Box podcast #1 was launched

It seems rather amazing to me that it was two years ago today - October 24, 2005 - when we launched this show with Blue Box Podcast #1 (I remember because 10/24 is just a great number for a geek!). It's been a long, strange trip since then... we've learned a lot... about podcasting, about building a community... and, of course, about VoIP security. We've put out 69 main shows and 21 special editions - a total of 90 shows... with more in the queue. It's truly been a remarkable experience and we greatly appreciate all the contributions and support we've had from all of you over the years. Thank you for all of your support!

Sadly, despite our best efforts, Blue Box #70 , our 2-year anniversary show, did NOT make it out today on our actual anniversary. With my schedule, we wound up trying to record tonight and unfortunately the hotel WiFi at the hotel I am staying at in New York City just wasn't up to giving us the quality recording that we wanted to have via Skype. Here's a taste of what we were experiencing:

If I read that right, we were getting a 32% packet loss... even if it was really 9%, it was still a lot. The roundtrip was much higher sometimes... up near 300 or more milliseconds. You just can't get a good recording in those circumstances. Skype was working fine earlier in the night, so I don't know if we just hit a time when more people were back at the hotel using the network. Whatever the reason, we eventually just had to give up. I thought about trying Yahoo!Voice or Gizmo, but generally if Skype is having problems the other ones will as well.

It's disappointing, primarily because I really wanted to get the show out today. We've recorded shows from hotels in the past (even using hotel WiFi) and this is the first time in two years that we've actually had to cancel a recording because of poor connectivity!

We're going to try again tomorrow from the Interop show where I did find I got great connectivity in some areas. We'll see. If not it may need to wait until Friday when I'm back in my home studio.

In the meantime, thanks again to all of you who have made this show a joy to produce and do each week!

Full Disclosure

Jonathan Zar is affiliated with Pingalo and is the Secretary of VOIPSA and member of the Board of Directors.

This is a personal project and neither the Internet Society, Pingalo nor VOIPSA have any formal connection to this podcast. In the interest of transparency we just thought you should know our affiliations.

Why "Blue Box"?

We chose the name "Blue Box" primarily as a nod to the era of phone phreaking in part to illustrate that threats to telephony are not new - they just continue to change and evolve. That and admittedly the name just sounded cool.